Pacific Island is "missing"

Where did it go? Scientists 'undiscover' Pacific island

Most explorers dream of discovering uncharted territory, but a team of Australian scientists have done the exact opposite.
They have found an island that doesn't exist.
The island, named Sandy Island on Google Earth, also exists on marine charts and world maps and allegedly sits between Australia and New Caledonia in
the south Pacific.
But when the voyage's chief scientist, Maria Seton, and her crew sailed past where the island should be, they found nothing but blue ocean.

"We became suspicious when the navigation charts used by the ship showed a depth of 1400 metres in an area where our scientific maps and Google Earth
showed the existence of a large island," Dr Maria Seton, a geologist from the University of Sydney, said.
"Somehow this error has propagated through to the world coastline database from which a lot of maps are made."

It has been suggested that the island first appeared on a map as a copyright trap, but has remained, unchallenged, ever since. It is normal
practice in cartography to place a fictitious "trap street" on a map for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators; however, the
Australian Hydrographic Service, a department of the Royal Australian Navy, opined that this would not have been standard practice with nautical
charts

The navigational chart in use on the vessel that discovered this anomaly did not have Sandy Island on it but on the vessels weather chart it
did exist!

The fact that the World Sector Coastline Database has the CIA mentioned as one of its sources is very interesting indeed.

I bet that's where they probably filmed "Lost". It only appears when it wants to appear. Fly a plane over it and crash it into the coordinates and see
if appears. Worked in the movies so I don't see why it can't work now.

I don't think that map feature ever really existed.. it's hypothesized that it's a map maker's watermark...false features have been added in the past
to identify someone who's copied another person's map... some of those false features still exist in modern maps because they weren't removed over
time..

I think the location of the "island" was blotted out just to reflect this recent news... it's not even in all maps currently .. it's not on landsat
for example ( landsatlook.usgs.gov... )

Sandy Island is a phantom island that was supposedly located between Australia and New Caledonia in the Coral Sea. The island appears on some
world maps, including Google Maps.[1] On Google Earth's default view the island area is covered by black pixels, but the program's historical
imagery feature has a satellite image of the southern portion taken by DigitalGlobe on 3 March 2009 showing nothing but sea. It also appeared
in some editions of the Times Atlas of the World (there labelled Ile de Sable, the French equivalent of Sandy Island).

maybe google took artistic license when developing it's earth program to save time and money and just added the island based on incorrect maps and
charts expecting nobody to go to the middle of the pacific to look for it.

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